Are results not required to be submitted within a week after the event?Is that specified somewhere?Are there any warnings given to the TD if this is not done?
At the top of the printed rating report form is this sentence:
For online submissions, when the event is submitted the form shows the number of days since the event, and if that is over 21 days, that message is in red. (I just changed that threshold to 9 days, though for the most part if the TD is submitting the event online it is usually done within 1-2 days of when the event ended.)
In the first 6 months of 2007, there were 493 events sent to the office and 3264 submitted online. That means 86.8% of the events were submitted online.
For the events submitted online, 2108 (64.5%) were rated within 2 days of when the event ended and 2791 (85.5%) were rated within 8 days of when the event ended. I allowed an extra day because an event submitted after 11PM central time may not be rated until the next morning.
For the events sent to the USCF office, 302 (61.2%) were rated within 14 days of when the event ended. (I allowed a few days for the event to be in the mail and get processed by the USCF office.)
Interestingly enough, the most tardy of the events submitted online was 127 days late while the most tardy of the mailed-in events was 118 days late.
I think for the most part the office’s stance has been to try to work with TDs to get tardy events submitted, even if more than 14 days old, rather than to become another reason for the TD to procrastinate doing the paperwork because he or she will get stomped on, though there comes a point when that’s the only recourse.
The first task is finding out that the event is late, if it isn’t one that had a TLA the office can’t possibly know it is tardy until someone, like a player or parent, complains. We estimate that about 25% of the events the USCF rates had a printed TLA.
Unfortunately, the TLA records are not yet computerized enough to enable us to compare TLAs against rated events to see if there are ones that are missing, though that’s something we’re working on. Chuck does a manual review of Grand Prix events once a month looking for non-submitted events, though for the most part those are all submitted online these days.
I’d be interested in hearing from active TDs as to what limits and/or sanctions they’d be willing to submit themselves to.
It is sometimes the organizer’s fault. I think I have sugested this before, maybe higher rating fees based on how late a tournament is submitted?
CoachBob,
Can you provide a little more detail about the tournament? Was it a scholastic event or a non-scholastic event? What were the logistics of the tournament? Was it a large tournament?
I believe that it’s good business for TDs to submit their tournaments in a timely manner, and whenever possible to have them rated on the same day. However the delay can be the fault of the organizer, especially if it is a scholastic event held in a school.
Last February I submitted a regional scholastic event held in Texas on February 11, 2007 but it wasn’t rated until 3-9-2007. There were 943 active participants.
The glitches were:
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The school district would not reimburse a credit card. It is against policy for nearly all districts in my area to reimburse a credit card. When a school is profiting from an event, it can become messy. That’s why we encourage chess booster clubs within the schools. Chess booster clubs can reimburse the TD immediately for scholastic events. This particular school district has no schools with a chess booster club.
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Since there were over a hundred new and renewing members this created errors on the tournament report. It is our common practice to process memberships online before submitting a report. However, there was that credit card issue with the school district.
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The school made a purchase order request for payments payable to the USCF. For those familiar with school districts the turnaround time for obtaining a check from a requisition is anywhere from 7 to 28 days.
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To make things worse the school district financing office neglected the address in Crossville we provided the organizer with. They had an old New York address on file, and decided to mail the checks there. This was not discovered until the US Chess accounting office and the TD worked together to investigate the delay. Susan and Chuck from the USCF were great.
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Once payment arrived, the memberships had to be manually processed even though we submitted a membership batch online on the day of the tournament. For some reason memberships are activated instantaneously when batches are submitted online with payment. Yet the electronic membership batch is ineffective if payment is sent through the mail. In other words, membership information has to be manually entered twice.
At any rate, I always say it’s the little extra things that you do which will make people remember your event and want to come back for more.
Good luck on your said tournament, but don’t be too quick to judge the TD in charge. See what the circumstances are first.
It is not true that the membership INFORMATION (ie, name, address, birthdate) has to be entered again when a membership is entered online but with payment by mail. However, the membership CODE (ie, 1 year adult, 2 year scholastic, etc) does have to be re-entered.
One of the reasons it is done that way is that a significant percentage of the time the checks that are sent in don’t add up to the amount that was due based on the membership types that were entered online, either because some memberships were changed from one type to another or because some of the memberships in the online batch aren’t included in the check(s) sent in.
That makes it necessary for the office to review the batch and make sure that only the memberships that were actually paid for are processed.
The idea of sliding rates based on when the event is submitted is fine in theory but a real pain in the neck to program and even worse to administer, because may people will have a reason (some better than others) why they shouldn’t be charged the higher fee.
Here’s the explanation one TD gave us for why an event was 2 months late being rated even though the rating report was initially uploaded within a few days of when the event ended:
The TD was a ‘hired gun’ for this event, the organizer was handling the memberships sold. Those memberships were not mailed to the USCF office until nearly 7 weeks after the event ended. Moreover, of the (roughly) 20 non-members in that event, only about 12 memberships were sent in at first. That delayed rating the event for another week or two.
The online submission process has been a tremendous help in speeding up the timeliness sending in tournaments and getting them rated quickly. Getting immediate ID numbers for new members is a big help. In the past non-members and expired members would often slip through, and delay the rating of tournaments for weeks on end.
Also the online membership submission process catches potential duplicate ID situations. I’d often end out with duplicate IDs because one week a coach would submit a list with a player’s name spelled one way, and several weeks later a different TD would get a different spelling of the same name, but with no MSA there was no way to check if it was the same person. I might have Jorge Rodriguez one week, and then the same kid shows again with the name spelled George Rodrigues.
I’m very fortunate in that I work for an organization that reimburses me for all my credit card transactions of memberships and rating fees. In a 150 to 200 player scholastic I typically have the rating report submitted by same evening that the event was completed. The only glitches come when a an expired member slips through, and I have to contact the parents or coach to get payment and address information.
Unfortunately when you’re dealing with a school district and requisitions it’s impossible to get around the delay in payments. Though it may be possible if the school district is willing to pay the affiliate for the fees, and then the affiliate reimburses the TD for the memberships paid on his credit card. We have schools that send our organization the entry and membership fees to us. That makes life a lot simpler.
It was a 28 player 2 section 5 round adult event and was rated on 7/11 at about the same time I wrote my question on this Forum.It was played on 6/23-24 and the results submitted online on 7/09,entered on 7/09 and rated on 7/11.
I think some TDs are simply not aware of the 7 day requested submission target and USCF should educate them with that info for the first delayed submission and perhaps if this pattern continues some censure should go on their TD record.
Rating fees are so low that any "fine" would have to be significant to make any difference in my estimation.
Though it’s annoying when events are submitted late, fortunately with the re-rate process it will get rated in the proper order. Being rated out of order thus impacting ratings was always my biggest gripe.
I think for the most part TDs are aware of the time limits, but sometimes for whatever reason submissions get delayed. Sometimes real life gets in the way of chess life.
Regardless of the size of the tournament you can have glitches. I ran a 6 player game/30 tournament at my club on a Monday night. Typically I submit the results as soon as I get home. However I had a player whose membership expired at the end of May. Neither of us were aware of it until I tried to submit the tournament. A phone call and email to the player resolved the problem, and I had the tournament rated by Thursday. It helped that the player in question had internet access and could pay for his membership online. It also helped that he won the tournament, and was just as anxious as I was to get it rated quickly. It would have been a lot harder if I had not reached the player fairly quickly, or he if he delayed in renewing.
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Though it’s annoying when events are submitted late, fortunately with the re-rate process it will get rated in the proper order. Being rated out of order thus impacting ratings was always my biggest gripe.
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I've always thought that so much rerating to have them rated in order was a huge waste of computer resources and that the ratings would even out over a short period of time.I believe when the "norm" system goes in players will have a goal to strive rather than their current rating.Then,it may be possible to pair by norm class rather than ratings.
One problem with pairing just by ‘norm class’ is that instead of having very few players with the same rating you’ll have LOTS of players with the same rating.
let’s assume a 20 player event has the following based on ‘norm class’:
1 master
3 experts
12 A players
2 B players
2 C players
How do you decide which A player is just below the cut, and gets paired against a master, and which A players get C players in their first round?
Players attach way too much significance to their rating, but at least they do give an orderly way to pair an event consistently.
Rerating isn’t just to put events into chronological order, it also enables us to properly deal with corrections. (We process dozens of corrections to events each month.)
The computational resources for rerating aren’t all that significant at this point. We rerated all events dating back to May of 2004 on Tuesday because of some cash prize floors that weren’t input at the time, as noted in a recent thread here in the Forums. This task ran in the background while we did other things, such as memberships and ratings, for about 10 hours.
The original poster does raise a few pertinent questions.
What do you do if the guy running a weekly chess club volunteers his time and effort every week for over 10-20 years. He occassionally pumps his own money into the club. He has had helpers in the past, but none of them stick around for more than a year. He’s an older guy and lacks general computer skills (e.g. does pairings by hand, which isn’t so hard for one game per week). But he’s also religious about being in charge of the pairings and results (and uses some old fashioned pairing methods).
So what do you do if this guy historically is slow submitting rating reports? He submits them eventually, some within two weeks but others many months later. People offer to help, but he often doesn’t trust them because they aren’t experienced TDs. Yet if the USCF punishes him, the chess club (60-80 players) dies because there is nobody dedicated enough to do all the work week after week.
What a catch-22. Unfortunately, it doesn’t affect me but rather several friends of mine who live hours away.
Michael Aigner
I had the very situation at a chess club that I rejoined last year after a 15 year absence. The TD is an old guy who does everything by hand. He has plenty of computer knowledge, but doesn’t have the time or the patience to learn the pairing software or how to submit a tournament online. He would do the rating report by hand, and give it to the club Treasurer who would write a check to the USCF and send it in at some point. Some point could be two weeks, or a month.
I offered to take the results from the club championship and put them into Swiss-Sys and submit online with him being the chief TD. I was trying not to step on his toes. This arrangement has worked out well. He does the pairings with cards, and I back him up with the computer. The tournament regulars have been very happy with immediate rating of the events.
It sounds like your friends need to find someone who could make a similar arrangement with the club TD.
[quote="I had the very situation at a chess club that I rejoined last year after a 15 year absence. The TD is an old guy who does everything by hand. He has plenty of computer knowledge, but doesn’t have the time or the patience to learn the pairing software or how to submit a tournament online. He would do the rating report by hand, and give it to the club Treasurer who would write a check to the USCF and send it in at some point. Some point could be two weeks, or a month.
I offered to take the results from the club championship and put them into Swiss-Sys and submit online with him being the chief TD. I was trying not to step on his toes. This arrangement has worked out well. He does the pairings with cards, and I back him up with the computer. The tournament regulars have been very happy with immediate rating of the events.
It sounds like your friends need to find someone who could make a similar arrangement with the club TD.[/quote]
I,too, am an old guy with very limited EDP skill.Our tournaments are small so I find it pretty easy to enter the results online by manual means,i.e. rather than have to upload from a software program,the USCF online system allows you to specify the # of players and rounds and you enter the USCF ID# and W,L or D for the results.When you save,it shows each player’s name so you can verify that.The edits are very neat-a great way for the computer challenged to report events!!!
Bob, the online entry form on TD/A is essentially the same interface the office staff uses to enter reports received on paper.
What they do is enter all the IDs, do a SAVE, then check the names against the report. Then they enter the results.
This appears to save time as well as help catch errors.
(If the event is more than about 10 players, I recommend doing another SAVE every 10 players or so. If there’s too long a delay between hitting SAVE you can time out.)
I manually entered a 31 player, 3 section event online when my computer crashed during between round 1 and 2 of an event. It was a fairly simple process.
I’m glad that I learned how to pair by hand 8 years ago before I starting using a computer. Since I didn’t have pairing cards on me, I goofed up a couple of pairings but everyone was still happy with the event and had it rated the night after instead of the same night as usual.
I’m doing another Event on Sunday that I will have to pair by hand and manually enter since my computer won’t be back from repair until Monday.
Luckily I have the pairing cards downloaded and printed now.
(o:
Over 30 days late and the TD is put on the FOC for the same period of time.
I wonder how many directors are left that can pair by hand. So many seem to just use a computer. The main reason that I’m a director now was when I was starting out in Mississippi, there was only 1 director who did almost everything. I would watch him do the pairings at the tournaments, and he took the time to explain it to me, and would occassionally let me pair a round after a while (checking on everything that I did, of course.) Now, it seems that many new directors only look at transposition rules, etc. before taking a test.